“Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them”—Lobel, Arnold. Whiskers and Rhymes. William Morrow & Co, 1988.

Download the NoCOUG Journal featuring an interview with Alex Gorbachev

Will certification help our careers? What are companies looking for in an entry-level Oracle database professional? Where have all the jobs gone? Is Oracle Database a legacy platform? Should we follow the Oracle party line? Are databases more evil than good? The board of directors of NoCOUG cordially invites you to download the latest issue of the NoCOUG Journal and read what Alex Gorbachev, CTO of Pythian, has to say to these and other questions.

This could be the most important issue of the NoCOUG Journal you will ever read. In addition to the interview with Alex, this issue of the NoCOUG Journal contains the full text of the chapter titled Battle Against Any Guess by Alex Gorbachev in the latest Oracle Database bestseller Expert Oracle Practices. Our book reviewer, Dave Abercrombie, worthy successor to Brian Hitchcock, reviews Expert Oracle Practices for the Journal and pronounces it “required reading for all Oracle Database professionals.”

The quality of the NoCOUG Journal is a clear reflection of the quality of Oracle Database education brought to you by the Northern California Oracle Users Group, now in its 24th year. A calendar-year membership in NoCOUG includes free admission to four quarterly education events (a.k.a. conferences) each with a keynote address, choice of twelve technical presentations, breakfast, lunch, snacks, refreshments, and raffles. Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?

How much does a NoCOUG membership cost? It doesn’t cost $400, as you might expect to pay for so much educational value. It doesn’t cost $300 and it doesn’t cost $200. It doesn’t even cost $100. Yes, a calendar-year NoCOUG membership only costs $95! Won’t you join today?

Please review the schedule for our spring conference on Thursday, May 20 at the Oracle conference center in the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores; there’s something there for everyone. Are you an application developer? Then you might be interested in the presentations on SQL and PL/SQL. Are you a database administrator? Then you might be interested in the presentations on RAC and Exadata. This is only a little taste of the educational presentations on tap at the spring conference. Our speakers include Oracle ACEs, Oracle ACE directors, members of the Oak Table Network, and Oracle authors.

In tough economic times, our employers cannot afford to send us to expensive educational courses. Why not take advantage of the great educational value that NoCOUG has to offer? Please RSVP today if you’d like to join me on May 20 at the Oracle conference center to hear Alex Gorbachev and other Oracle Database experts.

Warm regards,

Iggy FernandezNoCOUG Journal Editor

P.S. Please help NoCOUG reach more Oracle Database professionals by forwarding this message to your IT colleagues.

NoCOUG conferences and the NoCOUG Journal are made possible in part by the generous support of companies such as Confio Software. Confio’s Ignite for Oracle is a powerful SQL monitoring tool that identifies, analyzes, and resolves database performance problems affecting applications running on Oracle. Ignite captures detailed data about response time, queries, sessions, and server resources and then mines the data for historical trends, correlates problems, and exposes anomalies. Ignite is available for Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2. Visit the Confio website to download a free Ignite for Oracle trial or watch an interactive demo.